In 2-up games, Carcassonne closely resembles a kind of grappling or wrestling, where you try to tie up your opponent's meeples, usually by making cities incompletable with the set of tiles in the box. Once you have a numerical advantage in meeples, you have an edge on the probability distribution of tiles that come out of the box - you can make more speculative bets. Whereas in 3 or more player games, it's much more rewarding to be more cooperative if you can be, because specific attacking actions are to the benefit of the player(s) that aren't involved.

Then there's the management of liquidity of meeples through the lifecycle of the game. You want to invest a lot, early; but you need to try and get them back towards the endgame, so you can steal fields and place in micro-fields.

There's a surprising amount of subtlety that emerges from the gameplay. In particular, learning how different growth patterns make your resources easier or harder to steal, or worse, block from completion.